Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 14, 2011 @06:51PM
from the you-have-only-about-46,396,800-seconds dept.

sfcrazy writes "Debian now has concrete plans to bring GNU Hurd to the larger community. GNU Hurd is expected to be released with the release of Debian 7.0 Wheezy towards the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013. Debian maintainer Samuel Thibault has already produced a Debian GNU/Hurd CD Set with a graphic installer which is available to download."

This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.

Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.

In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.

The parent poster illustrates something very interesting: Why having a sense of humor and self-irony is still relevant.

Also, ignoring the "I'm better than you"-irony in your post, "technically superior to Linux" can easily be discussed. I think the kernel community would gladly point out that "the best technology" quickly becomes irrelevant if it's impossible to work with (say if takes two decades of flip-flopping just to release something people can use). And having "developer friendliness" as part of the "rate this technology"-bar is not far fetched, unless you actually want said technology to be: Irrelevant.

Someday maybe a HURD distribution will be released, and someday maybe HURD will surpass the market share of Linux. Until then, chill out and enjoy the source.

This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.

Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.

In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.

GC

Because taking the piss is far more amusing to us in our juvenile little minds.

In all seriousness though, the big problem is that GNU Hurd has just been going on too long. You might notice that many people are comparing it to Duke Nukem, this is because they have both been successively over hyped for too many years. It is like people crying wolf, eventually the would be rescuers just stop listening and let you get eaten.

I started reading this thinking that GNU Hurd had finally found some developers an was on course for a stable release in the near future. After looking around the site it seems that you only have 4 or 5 active developers and are in dire need of more people to make the Wheezy release. If this is the case then try and ask the community for help, cap in hand with humility. You are far more likely to bring developers to the system by that than by simply posting a projected release date which may or may not be achievable.

You are right though when you say the slashdot community has changed a great deal as it certainly has. But some of the people here are still exactly the people you would like to bring to your projects, either GNU Step or Hurd or whatever. The trick is to appeal to them and ignore the mass of immature wanna bees you are so critical of.

The whole problem with hurd has never been a technical shortcoming, it has always been that the people leading the project lacked the people skills needed. Thats certainly not to say that Linus is perfect in this regard, but something certainly made more people throw time at his pet Linux project all those years ago.

Are you trying to illustrate your words by acting as if you were yourself really "superior" ?

I heard about hurd long time ago and it was already a long time project. I heard it will soon be released so many time that I can't count them. I even actually spoke with people working on it (about ten years ago) that were assuring me that the project was on the run for a stable release.

Ten years later, I'm acting as supervisor for student writing their own kernels every year: in 4 years of activities I have seen about 7 kernel projects reaching an "interesting state", and those kernel were all "experimental" in their own way: micro-kernel, coded in some specific language (D, OCaml... ), fully modularized, coded for exotic architectures... All are single-man project done by students.

Booting and reaching the state were drivers and userland are the next checkpoint is not so hard, even when you deal with "new inner architecture". But keeping a project really active so that you reach a stable state, is much harder, and it seems that hurd fails on that matter.

Hurd might have been "new" twenty years ago, but for now, it is just another not-working micro-kernel.

The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux.

Why is it superior? Just because it's a microkernel?

Microkernels were the darling of OS research for almost the entirely of the 90's. But by the end of the 90's, most researchers had had enough. The alleged gains in configurability, reliability, security, and so on never materialized; but what never disappeared was the fact that they were stinking slow. Context switching is a fundamental limitation of such an architecture. And from what I've heard, a lot more complicated to program -- which leads to more programming errors and ugly performance hacks to compensate for any potential increase in reliability, security and so on they might have gained.

It's possible that Hurd has managed to overcome these limitations. But it has definitely earned its reputation of being slow and cumbersome; if that has changed, the burden of proof is on the Hurd community.

There are a few True Believers out there, still working on Hurd and Minix and L4 and the like, but they have yet to produce anything shown to be worth using.

I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.